Posts tagged Danny Bonaduce

Lew Rockwell’s recent interview of Naomi Wolf for his podcast — the scare quotes are there because it quickly turns into a very two-sided conversation, and works very differently from a conventional interview — is really remarkable, and a paradigm for the kind of engagement that could build a vibrant libertarian Left. Naomi Wolf is not my favorite feminist, and Lew Rockwell is certainly not my favorite libertarian, but this is great stuff. Naomi Wolf now says she thinks she’s been a secret libertarian for many years in many, many ways and mentions that she’s feeling increasingly sympathetic toward radical libertarianism; she insists on the importance of challenging both Democratic- and Republican-sponsored power grabs, and expresses sympathy for the libertarian case for abolishing federal control over schooling. Rockwell does a tolerable job of explaining the libertarian case against the Fed as a instrument of class warfare, does a good job of cautioning against premature jumps into statist political action, and comes out that the conservative movement has been an engine of fascism for the past 50 years. Also, Wolf has some great material at about 23:45 in the interview about the way in which media producers deliberately encourage false-alternative shouting matches and instruct their guests that serious deliberation is not good television.

Yglesias, in reply to Roderick and Steven Horwitz, says he is a bit puzzled by pragmatic arguments for left-libertarianism, based on the claim that markets do more for human flourishing than government programs, writing: If this means that the absence of governance à la Joseph Stalin is a more important determinant of our well-being than is, say, the existence of unemployment insurance then, yes, of course this is true. But the question facing government programs is not whether they are more or less beneficial than the existence of a market economy, the question is whether the programs are more beneficial than would be the absence of programs.Roderick does a great job of responding to Yglesias (as well as to some another reply by Dean Baker) here. Let me just add a bit more about the fundamental problem with Yglesias’s proposed methods for assessing whether or not a given government program is warranted.

The problem here is that Yglesias seems to be treating this as a ceteris paribus comparison: as if the right question to ask is whether people would be better off with the government program in place or in a situation which is exactly identical, but without the government program.

There are two problems with this. First, unless there is some strong reason to believe that ceteris will stayparibus in the absence of a government program, the real alternative is between a government program and market alternatives to that program. So, for example, Yglesias mentions ex ante environmental regulations. But he rigs the match by apparently comparing outcomes with ex ante environmental regulations to outcomes from a market situation which is basically the same as the present, but in which corporate polluters are free to go on polluting with impunity. An un-rigged comparison would be one between ex ante environmental regulations and free market means of addressing pollution that the ex ante regulations have either directly suppressed or crowded out — like the use of pollution nuisance suits or a more robust use of free market grassroots activism, through boycotts, sustainability certification, social investing, and so on. Maybe these kind of tactics would not be as effective as ex ante regulation, or maybe they would be more effective; but in either case, this is the comparison that actually needs to be made, and as far as I can tell Yglesias hasn’t given any argument to support a claim that market methods would do worse. Indeed, there’s some good reasons to think that they might do better. Since freed-market methods are by their nature decentralized, and not dependent on political lobbying or electioneering, they are also not subject to the same problems of regulatory capture by those who can put a lot of money and political influence behind their interests.

Second, Yglesias also more or less explicitly suggests that, when you’re deliberating over whether to favor government programs or freed-market alternatives, any given government program ought to be assessed in isolation from all the others (on a case-by-case basis). But of course libertarian Leftists have repeatedly stressed the importance of seeing particular social or political processes in the context of how many different processes interlock and interact with each other. So, for example, as Roderick has repeatedly stressed, if you want to know about whether to prefer unfettered free markets or regulatory command-and-control in financial markets, it doesn’t make sense to compare a rigged market where finance capital is tightly regulated and can reasonably expect government bail-outs in case of failure to a rigged market where finance capital is loosely regulated but can still reasonably expect government bail-outs in case of failure. Whether the latter or the former turns out to have better results is a question we could debate, but the important point, from a left-libertarian point of view, is that it would be more interesting and fruitful to compare the rigged markets to a free market with neither ex ante regulation nor bail-outs. Similarly, if we are looking at environmental regulations then we have to consider not only market alternatives to ex ante environmental regulation; we also have to consider other government programs which may indirectly contribute to environmentally destructive practices — like subsidizing corporate centralization and capital-intensive production; or stealing land from homeowners and small businesses for large, polluting manufacturing plants, garbage incinerators, and other forced-modernization boondoggles; or subsidizing fossil fuel dependence; or highway-driven suburban sprawl — and whether the absence of those other programs, taken together with the absence of ex ante environmental regulation, would make freed-market alternatives to ex ante environmental regulation even more palatable than they would be when considered in isolation. (For some similar points in the context of health care, see GT 2007-10-25: Radical healthcare reform.)

Meanwhile, Roderick’s article has also prompted a lot of discussion outside of Cato Unbound, most notably interesting but misguided replies from Peter Klein, Will Wilkinson, and an extremely ill-conceived response by Walter Block and J.H. Huebert. I’ve already discussed Block’s and Huebert’s comments, with a focus on their distortion of my own expressed views (cited favorably by Roderick) on radical labor unionism.. There’s a lot of fascinating exchange among Klein, some other right-libertarians and agnostic-libertarians, and a number of libertarian Leftists in the comments thread on Klein’s article; note especially the exchange among Araglin, Klein, P.M. Lawrence and others over the legitimacy and viability of the corporate form, limited liability, etc., under freed markets, and this short comment by Jesse Walker: It seems clear to me that, at the very least, the “more local and more numerous” claim is correct, if not in every sector than certainly in the economy as a whole. Removing occupational licensing laws alone would unleash such a flood of tiny enterprises — many of them one-man or one-woman shows, sometimes run part-time — that I doubt the elimination of antitrust law and small-business setasides would offset it. Especially when large businesses have proven so adept at using antitrust and setasides for their own purposes. . . . . (Jesse promises a more detailed follow-up at Hit and Run; I look forward to it.)

On the activist front, this past Monday, New Jersey ALLy Darian Worden announced a new series of Alliance of the Libertarian Left outreach flyers and subversion squares available from the NJ ALL website. Enjoy! (I also think there will be some interesting news in the near future about ALL in Southern California, England, Denver, and some new activities for ALL in Las Vegas. But I’m not going to tip my hand more than that in public, just yet. If you’re curious — and especially if you are in one or more of those geographical areas — drop me a line in private.

The central point of Roderick Long’s essay seems completely correct to
me—powerful actors in society seek to use their power in order to
manipulate the state apparatus to get what they want. Corporations are
powerful actors in our society, and they want money. Thus, what
corporations are after in politics is political action that gets them money
and whether or not this coincides with the dictates of a purist laissez faire vision is a matter of mere
happenstance.

In what I find a puzzling move, Long thinks that the main upshot of this
is to cast doubt on the legitimacy of castigating libertarians as corporate
stooges. I would say the real upshot is to cast doubt on the cogency of
the libertarian enterprise. Thinkers affiliated with the libertarian
movement have had many smart things to say on individual topics, but
the overall concept of a state apparatus that simply sits on the sideline
watching the free market roll along is impossibly utopian. People are
going to try to manipulate the state to advance their own ends.

Well, I certainly agree with that.

That’s part of the reason I’m a market anarchist, not a Constitutionalist or a minimal-statist. And, while I can speak only for myself, last I checked, that’s why Roderick is a market anarchist, too.

But DBOB is puzzled, apparently because it hasn’t occurred to him that a libertarian might envision forms of social organization (and forms of resistance to corporatism) outside of the political apparatus, and so he concludes that libertarianism offers no realistic proposals for resisting corporate power-grabs and big business’s domination of the public policy space. Apparently disarming your enemy doesn’t count as a realistic or desirable strategy; Yglesias prefers to shoot first and ask questions later. And, he figures, as long as everyone’s going to be going around robbing each other anyway, we all ought to get together and get some of it while the getting’s good.

As far as political strategery goes, Yglesias’s article is perfectly correct as a critique of what he calls libertarianism—that is, the sort of thing engaged in by soft limited-govermentalist outfits like Cato or the Libertarian Party. (Whether it’s morally acute is quite another matter; not having any realistic way of achieving anti-robbery goals is no reason to jump wholeheartedly into counter-robbery instead, unless you think that the desirability or undesirability of particular political-economic end states overrules any consideration of the propriety of the means by which you promote or avoid them. Maybe Yglesias thinks that; but he’s given no argument in favor of it.)

In Anarchy, there is another way. If we stop trying to build the structures envisioned by the Left using the tools of the ruling class, and if we refocus our efforts on achieving our goals by means of people-powered organizing, voluntary association, grassroots mutual aid, and person-to-person solidarity, then workers can get what we need through free markets and free association. When the things that matter most in our lives are the things that we make for ourselves, each of us singly, or with many of us choosing to work together in voluntary associations, there will be no need to waste years of our lives and millions or billions of dollars fighting wars of attrition with back-room king-makers or trying to keep erstwhile friends in office on the right track—because we will not need to get any of the things that they are trying to hoard. When we expect the State to limit itself through the very process that gives it power, or when we go after the State’s patronage, politics makes prisoners of us all. But freedom means that when the powers that be try to rope you along for something stupid, or try to snuff out something brilliant, we can turn around, walk away, and do things for ourselves—whether they like it or not.

Here’s the Danny Bonaduce of the Blogosphere, marking the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr., to reflect on the comforting lies about Dr. King, which the New Class political-intellectual complex has spent the last 40 years manufacturing and promoting:

Kai Wright has an excellent piece on the
forgotten radicalism of Martin Luther King, Jr. — always a point worth making in a day and age when conservatives would
like you to think they would have been standing right beside King when he marched on Washington.

That said, to some extent I think the creation of the King Myth and the displacement of the more authentic
radical King is a good thing. A country doesn’t get official national hero types without mythologizing and
sanitizing them to a large extent, and it’s a good thing, at the end of the day, that King has moved into
national hero status.

It seems to me that if the only way you can get official national hero types is by oversimplifying, lying, and thus eviscerating the substance of a world-changing life of work and body of thought, then official national hero types are worth less than nothing. What interest do they serve, and what are we supposed to need them for?

Certainly not the interest of honesty, or truth, and it seems to me that in these times those are coins far rarer — and therefore far more dear — than the pompous deliveries of the cosseted clique of power-tripping politicians and professional blowhards, who have convinced themselves that their collective in-jokes, shibboleths and taboos constitute the public life of a nation. I don’t give much of a damn, in the end, whether or not King gets ritualistically name-checked by men and women who were or would have been his mortal enemies to make stentorian speeches supposedly on his behalf. What I give a damn about is what the man, for all his many faults, actually cared about, fought for, and died for: the struggle of ordinary men and women for their own freedom, which meant their struggle to defy, resist, or simply bypass the consolidated violence of the belligerent power-mongers and the worse-than-useless moderate hand-wringers who made their living peddling excuses, apologetics, and the endless counsel of wait, wait.

This, not public-school pageants and official national hero types, is what the vast majority of us, who get no profit from the fortunes of the political-intellectual complex and its pantheon, need:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and
rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction
that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about
Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the
changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of
the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world
today — my own government.

… All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

… These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

… A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never
voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the
oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action
movement that was well timed, according to the timetable of
those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.
For years now I have heard the words Wait! It rings in the
ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This Wait
has almost always meant Never. We must come to see with the
distinguished jurist of yesterday that justice too long delayed
is justice denied.

We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our
constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa
are moving with jet-like speed toward the goal of political
independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the
gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy
for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to
say, Wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your
mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at
whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick,
brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with
impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million
Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the
midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue
twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your
six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park
that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling
up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored
children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to
form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her
little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward
white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a
five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: Daddy, why do
white people treat colored people so mean?; when you take a
cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after
night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no
motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out
by nagging signs reading white and colored; when your
first name becomes nigger, your middle name becomes
boy (however old you are) and your last name becomes
John, and your wife and mother are never given the respected
title Mrs.; when you are harried by day and haunted by night
by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe
stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with
inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a
degenerating sense of nobodiness; then you will understand
why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup
of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged
into an abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our
legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break
laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so
diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954
outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange
and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well
ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying
others? The answer is found in the fact that there are two
types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would be
the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but
a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral
responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would
agree with Saint Augustine that An unjust law is no law at
all. … So I can urge men to disobey segregation ordinances because they
are morally wrong.

…

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish
brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have
been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost
reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling
block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s
Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is
more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a
negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace
which is the presence of justice; who constantly says I agree
with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods
of direct action; who paternalistically feels he can set the
timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time
and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a more
convenient season. Shallow understanding from people of
goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from
people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering
than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and
order exist for the purpose of establishing justice, and that when
they fail to do this they become dangerously structured dams that
block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white
moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is
merely a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious
negative peace, where the Negro passively accepted his unjust
plight, to a substance-filled positive peace, where all men will
respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we
who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of
tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is
already alive. We bring it out in the open where it can be seen and
dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is
covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to
the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be
exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light
of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can
be cured. …

… You spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I
was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my
nonviolent efforts as those of the extremist. … But as I
continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a bit of
satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an
extremist for love — Love your enemies, bless them that curse
you, pray for them that despitefully use you. Was not Amos an
extremist for justice — Let justice roll down like waters and
righteousness like a mighty stream. Was not Paul an extremist
for the gospel of Jesus Christ — I bear in my body the marks of
the Lord Jesus. Was not Martin Luther an extremist — Here I
stand; I can do none other so help me God. Was not John Bunyan
an extremist — I will stay in jail to the end of my days before
I make a butchery of my conscience. Was not Abraham Lincoln an
extremist — This nation cannot survive half slave and half
free. Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist — We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. So
the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of
extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be
extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of
injustice—or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? In
that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill, three men were crucified. We
must not forget that all three were crucified for the same
crime—the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality,
and thusly fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ,
was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose
above his environment. So, after all, maybe the South, the nation
and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

For anybody other than a self-appointed public intellectual, honest appraisal and serious engagement with the real life, virtues, foibles, questions, and struggles of a creative extremist like King are things more profound, more beautiful, more powerful, more passionate, and ultimately more useful than all the combined hagiographies and bed-time stories of the canonized saints of American theo-nationalism.

Like the Holy Roman Empire, this Friday Random Ten is neither Friday, nor Random, nor Ten. But it is (I think) a good idea;
thanks to Random Thoughts and to Trish Wilson for it. Here’s the idea: you’ve probably all heard of the Friday Random Ten music game. This is sort of like that, except that it’s ten links. The links go to ten worthy posts by webloggers outside of the usual club of folks you link to. Why? Because weblogging, and political weblogging in particular, is interesting and fun and increasingly important but it’s also got a tendency to be inbred and clubby. Most of us are not atop the A-list “dominant link hierarchy,” but we participate in it, and if we don’t try to break up the cartel a bit, who will? The Danny Bonaduce of the blogosphere? I think not. So here’s mine:

When it comes to the hand-wringing and the bloviating over the Left’s attitude towards feminism, abortion, and sexuality, media girl 2005-02-24: Not negotiable puts it better than I could in just three sentences:

What a lot people — mostly men — don’t seem to understand is that women’s control over our own bodies is not negotiable. We are not slaves. We are not breeding machines to be regulated and controlled by the government.

Ohlook. We have another well-meaning non-sexist liberal
non-discriminatory fuckwit around being all concerned about
how women just don’t choose to talk about politics. Or maybe
it’s that they’re innately less comfortable with the “food
fight” nature of political discourse.

How the fuck do men ever manage to succeed in any kind of
intellectual endeavor without bothering to find out what the
fuck they’re talking about before shooting their mouths off?
Oh yeah, right, it’s the magic power of the cock. Jesus.

Bean has a new blog (you may know her from her posts on Alas, A Blog), and in Cool Beans 2005-03-03: The Invisibility of Feminism she points to another one for the what is seen and what is not seen file. Here we have one of the countless examples of why men in the media seem able to confidently declare feminism dead once every five years or so, without the least bit of circumspection: because nobody seems to feel obligated to actually, y’know, look up feminist publications before they gather their data and start spouting off.

Hanna Wallach posted
her
slides from a talk she gave on Debian Women yesterday. She
showed statistics showing that 10-20% of computer science
undergrads are women, and that 20-35% of IT professionals are
women, and yet there are only 4-8 women among the nearly 1000
developers of the open source Debian "universal"
operating system. That’s less than one percent. While Hanna
mentions possible reasons briefly, her main concern in the
talk is to show what is being done in Debian Women.

It’s good to see that the topic is being addressed, and everyone’s best wishes should be with Debian Women, which seems to be off to a good running start; one can only pray that the boys will keep tabs on the organizing and action that’s going on, instead of treating everyone to a trimonthly outbreak of oblivious Where are all the female software developers? e-mails on devel mailing lists…

From iVillage and by Richie Sambora. Sambora couldn’t tell you
shit about playing guitar, and he’s a
guitarist. So why do we assume he knows something about being a
man? As usual, we women are presumed pretty clueless when it
comes to men. Men, however, know everything they need to know
about us.

…

We want you to be our mothers.

Heather Locklear is a saint. And now I have the unfortunate
image of her man calling her Mommy and I’m all upset.

We don’t mind it when you dress us.

If he asks for a sponge bath next, I hope Locklear takes a
moment to remember that she is a stunning beauty who has
exactly zero reason to fear that she’s headed for spinsterhood
if she suddenly gave up playing Airplane in order to get her
husband to eat.

Avedon Carol 205-03-05: How you become crazy takes on the pervasive idiot notion that any ideological skew in the media, if it exists, is prima facie evidence that the media is doing something wrong and therefore needs to change:

I have never understood why this should be a criticism of the
media, anymore than it makes sense that this is a negative
trait of academe; if the people who are best educated and
most aware of what is going on are more liberal, maybe that’s
because you have to be ignorant to swallow conservatism. What
is really suggested by this “criticism” is that the alleged
“bias” isn’t bias at all, it’s just a recognition of what is,
and that bias is required to lean to the right of this
“liberal” position. Indeed, the behavior we’re seeing from
the administration is fairly explicit in that we are told
that simple facts are “biased”. The news media are not
supposed to tell the public the truth about anything because
that would bias us against the administration. The real
question is not, then, about a bias toward liberalism or
conservatism, but rather a belief that “news” should make
some attempt to serve the public rather than just the
corporate hierarchy.

…

Those people really do need reminders. They need to be told
every single time they spew right-wing bull. They need to be
reminded over and over that reality still holds sway for at
least half of the population. Most of all, they need to be
told that we’re not talking about forgetfulness and errors
and “misstatements” from Condi and George and friends, we’re
talking about lying, and they should call a spade a spade.

Whether Avedon’s right or not about all that (I think she’s clearly right about the media’s limitless charity for Bush administration fraudsters, probably right about some parts of reporters’ policy skew, and probably mistaken about others), the underlying point is awfully damned important: the demographic arguments that “liberal media” bloviators (and their “corporate media” comrades on the Left) aren’t enough to show anything in particular. The perverse sort of ideological identity politics that the Right especially loves these days needs to be called for what it is: pure bluff.

Then he went on to flagellate that old tired concept that
everyone knows is a lie: The Vicious Liberal Media. His
commentator? The resentful Ari Fleischer, clearly still
smarting from his days as White House Press Secretary

Clancy at CultureCat 2005-03-04: Orphan Works: Tell the Copyright Office Your Stories calls for shedding light on one of the rarely-seen but often-onerous unintended consequences of the intellectual enclosure regime: valuable works are left in limbo when you can’t find their copyright holders. I’m sure that making works completely impossible to reproduce for a good 70 years or so is really incentivizing some creative excellence. Somehow.

Micha Ghertner at Catallarchy 2005-03-06: Small Is Beautiful points out something that you just don’t see in most discussions of prying education out of the hands of the bureaucratic State: the way that government monopolization of schools and politicized pressures constrict schools into multimillion dollar all-things-to-all-people facilities—thus forcing down the number of groups that could reasonably get a school off the ground—thus forcing them into crowded splinding-and-sorting centers for thousands of students:

Would people want to send their kids to small, simple, less
expensive schools? Would some parents drop off their kids at an
individualized schooling program for a few hours, and then take
them to the gym or the community center for a sports league or
a friendly pick-up game with other children? Those who are
satisfied with the current system of institutionalized
babysitting may want to stick with the status quo. Those who
would prefer a close-knit atmosphere, where everyone knows each
other by name, and where the programs and costs are specially
tailored to each individual student’s needs, may conclude that
bigger is not always better.

Some fifteen or eighteen years ago, when I had not been out of
the convent long enough to forget its teachings, nor lived and
experienced enough to work out my own definitions, I considered
that marriage was a sacrament of the Church or it was
civil ceremony performed by the State, by which a man
and a woman were united for life, or until the divorce court
separated them. With all the energy of a neophyte freethinker,
I attacked religious marriage as an unwarranted interference on
the part of the priest with the affairs of individuals,
condemned the until death do us part promise as one of
the immoralities which made a person a slave through all his
future to his present feelings, and urged the miserable
vulgarity of both the religious and civil ceremony, by which
the intimate personal relations of two individuals are made
topic of comment and jest by the public.

By all this I still hold. Nothing is more disgustingly vulgar
to me than the so-called sacrament of marriage; outraging of
all delicacy in the trumpeting of private matters in the
general ear. Need I recall, for example, the unprinted and
unprintable floating literature concerning the marriage of
Alice Roosevelt, when the so-called American princess
was targeted by every lewd jester in the country, because,
forsooth, the whole world had to be informed of her forthcoming
union with Mr. Longworth! But it is neither the religious nor
the civil ceremony that I refer to now, when I say that
those who marry do ill. The ceremony is only a form, a
ghost, a meatless shell. By marriage I mean the real thing, the
permanent relation of a man and a woman, sexual and economical,
whereby the present home and family life is maintained. It is
of no importance to me whether this is a polygamous, polyandric
or monogamous marriage, nor whether it is blessed by a priest,
permitted by a magistrate, contracted publicly or privately, or
not contracted at all. It is the permanent dependent
relationship which, I affirm, is detrimental to the growth of
individual character, and to which I am unequivocally opposed.
Now my opponents know where to find me.

O.K.; that was eleven, not ten. And the eleventh isn’t exactly a blog link anyway. But I did warn you ahead of time that Friday Random Ten would be a name here, not a definite description. And if the dominant link hierarchy in the weblog world is worth breaking up, then I’d have to say that it’s also worth breaking up weblog reading with a bit of material that was written before the turn of the 21st century. Enjoy the subversion!

About

radgeek.com is a long-running weblog written by Charles W. Johnson,
an individualist anarchist writer living and working in Auburn, Alabama. [more]

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